What Do Socialist Revolutionaries Want?

WHY DO WE NEED A PARTY

Russia has a new life. Yesterday, we were pathetic slaves, trembling and bending before every insignificant thing; today, we are free citizens. We are free to assemble, free to talk, write, read what we want, not afraid of unnecessary prohibitions, not walking in eternal fear of the police. Emboldened by freedom, we proudly and hopefully look forward and cheerfully begin to build a new life. For we are now the masters of our Russia.

But how to build? Setting up a small economy all at once is not feasible. And organizing the vast expanse of Russia, which spans one-sixth of the world and encompasses dozens of nations and hundreds of millions of people, is not easy. To achieve any progress, it is necessary for all of us to work together diligently and for a long time. Each individual must ponder it thoroughly, then come to an agreement, and then carry it out with united efforts. But one person cannot consider everything alone. Even scientists do not possess all knowledge, and an ordinary person may have little to contribute. It is necessary that not one person, but many, think. And not for themselves alone, but for all. Specialists and experts in various state affairs should contribute their thoughts. One may have expertise in land management, another in the legal system, and yet another in commerce. We must weigh everything, calculate everything, and provide the most reasonable answer to every question.

But you and I will have one answer, while others will have a different one. The laborer wants to reduce their work and increase their earnings, while the factory owner wants just the opposite: to work more but earn less. The tiller of the soil says that they need land because they cultivate it, while the landowner thinks that it is not harmful for them to have land.

It's not enough just to think it through. It is also necessary to take action, to stand firm. All this is possible only if individual citizens unite into parties. A party is like a regiment: with its own commander, with its own superiors, with its own weapons. But the weapons of the party are not the gun, the bayonet, or the bomb, but the word, the thought, the book, and finally the voice it has in all matters of state. In the party, as in a regiment, everyone knows his place, his duties, and at the right moment, it can declare mobilization and call all its members to fight for its opinion, for its right. How much strength does one soldier have? A whole regiment is a mighty force.

Each party has its own program. What it wants, what it fights for, what it achieves - everything is neatly written down. The program cannot always be the same, for times change and people change. How long have we been asking the Tsar for even a small amount of freedom? Now the Tsar himself is imprisoned, and our freedom is complete. Now the parties will probably change their programs a little, but the main essence will remain. Although our parties have not yet had time to adapt their programs to the new times, it does not hurt to look at what they wanted before, for what they went to prisons and camps, to execution and torture. It means that they had great strength and fervent faith.

And now it is especially important for everyone to know what the different parties want. It is the right and duty of the citizen. Currently, all power rests with the entire populace. It is up to all of us and each of us individually to organize our state in a good and reasonable way. And as we arrange things now, so we will live for years to come. For coups d'état do not happen every day and every year. For the order in the state is not easy to change.

Every nation has many parties. And all of them choose beautiful names for themselves, and all of them speak good words. Therefore, it is not a simple matter to find out which of them is the best, who is right and who is wrong. It is necessary to fully understand in detail what each party thinks and how. It is necessary to know not only its words, but also its deeds, and what kind of people command it, and then to decide to whom which party is more suitable.

Here we want to tell simply and clearly, without dark words or embellishments, about the Russian party of socialist-revolutionaries. We will not discuss what is good or bad in this party, or what it can achieve and what it may never achieve. We only want to say what the party itself says. Everyone has their own head on their shoulders and their own mind. Let each one decide for themselves.

WHAT DO THE SOCIALIST-REVOLUTIONARIES THINK OF OUR LIVES?

Between men, they say, there is much wickedness and unrighteousness. Man is unequal to man, the rich own the poor. The rich man works little but lives sweetly in his pleasure; the poor man works a lot but is hungry and poor. The landowner owns the land, but the peasant works it; the landowner gets rich, but the farmer gets nothing. The factory workers work in the factory, but their strength only diminishes, while the factory owner's capital grows. This is not fair: land, factories, all tools, and machines should belong to the workers.

The present order is not only unjust but also unreasonable, say the socialist revolutionaries; it is harmful to all people. No matter how rich a person is, he wants more and is always chasing money. People become greedy, venal, and corrupt. Envy and malice are born among them. One factory owner, wanting to get rich, employs many workers and makes too many goods, and when sales are slow, he discharges the workers. Where can they go? They've become accustomed to no other work. Another, in order to raise prices, holds back work and also lays off workers. The worker never knows what will happen to him tomorrow and lives only at the mercy of his master. In the countryside, the power of the landlord over the peasant is even greater.

But, say the socialist revolutionaries, the capitalists do not benefit from their great wealth. Not knowing what to do with their money, they buy themselves countless pleasures, ruining their health, and in the end, they do not find happiness in life's joys. Enlightened people, seeing how wrongly they gain their money and how they spend it frivolously, turn away from them and go to help the working people.

But the workers themselves, year after year, are becoming more and more aware of their own usefulness and are no longer willing to put up with their bitter plight. Sixty years ago, the Russian peasantry, then still serfs, rose up against their masters, demanding land and freedom. Just at that time, some landlords began to build factories for themselves, and they needed workers. And a forced laborer is not suitable for a factory: there, it is necessary to work not out of fear, but out of conscience, thoughtfully and wisely. So some landlords set 'their' peasants free, without giving them a piece of land to work in the factory. The government of that time realized that it was impossible to let all the peasants go without land, but in order not to anger the landlords, it gave them small plots on which it was impossible to raise a decent farm. And how could one manage a farm when the government did not give any aid and did not allow educated people to work with the peasantry, when the peasant was kept in ignorance and in dire poverty by all means?

And to prevent the people from seeking a better fate, they were intoxicated with vodka, and other peoples living among the Russians were incited to hatred against Jews and other ethnic groups. The old government and the police were always allied with the nobles, landlords, and village kulaks, who squeezed all the juices out of the people. And all together they ruled the country as they pleased, to the detriment of the people.

In order to prevent all this, say the socialist-revolutionaries, land and factories and all property, from which the owner receives income by other people's labor, should be taken over by the state. And the state should be governed by all working people. Everyone should work for the benefit of all.

HOW SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES WANT TO ORGANIZE RUSSIA.

How to organize the state so that everything is in accordance with the righteousness of justice, so that there are no offended and disadvantaged, and so that the enemies of the people cannot take the upper hand?

Socialist-revolutionaries have always stood against tsarist rule and demanded a democratic republic. In such a republic, all citizens at least 20 years of age should be free: men and women, Russians, Jews, Armenians, and all the inhabitants of Russia. There should be no nobles, bourgeoisie, or peasants: all should be equal citizens.

Everyone has the right to believe as they wish (freedom of conscience), to write, speak, and assemble as they please, as long as it does not infringe upon the rights of others, to form unions, assemblies, and strikes.

The Church should be separated from the state, so that it does not receive money from the treasury and is not subordinate to the government. Elections to the State Duma, to the zemstvos, urban and all should be universal, direct, equal, secret, and proportional, i.e., the larger a party, the more representatives it should elect. Important laws must be put to a popular vote. If the people do not approve such a law, it is not enacted. On the contrary, the people themselves can demand that a law they desire be enacted. Judges and all officials must be elected by the people, and the people can always dismiss them if they wish. The court is free of charge.

All are obliged to study, but at public expense, each according to his abilities. Everyone may study, speak, and write papers in their own language.

There should be no standing army. Instead, there should be a people's militia. In general, socialist-revolutionaries and all socialists are against war. War, they say, there should be no war between nations; nations should live in peace and friendship, so there is no need for an army. No one should attack us, and we should not attack anyone. But now the war is already going on, and we cannot lay down our arms without driving the enemy out of our land. Therefore, socialist revolutionaries are now standing for the end of wars.

On the labor issue, the Socialist-Revolutionaries advocate for an 8-hour workday, and if the work is harmful, the workday should be even shorter. This should be enshrined in law. Workers should unite in unions. Unions, together with city or zemstvo administrations, establish wages; no one can pay or receive less than this wage.

Workers should be insured against accidents, unemployment, illness, old age, and so on, at the expense of the state and the employers, but the entire insurance process should be in the hands of the workers themselves.

Work must be carried out as cleanly, safely, and as far as possible, to avoid impairing the health of the worker. Children under 16 years of age are not allowed to work. Women and adolescents may only work where it is not harmful to them and may have rest when they need it. All this must be supervised by special people (factory inspectors and inspectoresses) chosen by the workers themselves. In general, workers should have a voice in the organization of internal order in factories and plants.

In the land question, the socialist-revolutionaries demand that all land be transferred into the hands of rural societies; neighboring societies join together in unions for equalized use of land. For the land, they say, is nobody's and should be in the hands of the one who now cultivates it. All the land should belong to all the people, and everyone should have as much land as he can cultivate: neither more nor less. State and monastery lands should pass into the hands of the people. The lands from which revenues went in favor of the tsar and his family (cabinet lands, appanage lands) also belong to the people.

Labor farms should not have to pay for land. If they are required to, the calculation should ensure that the farmer recovers the costs of land cultivation and labor payment. If the previous landowner spent money on fertilizers, this money should be refunded to them from the treasury. As long as the land is in the hands of landlords, they should be taxed so that all the main income from the land goes to the benefit of urban and rural communities.

As for taxes, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party has always advocated for a progressive income tax, meaning the greater a person's income, the higher the tax on every hundred rubles of their income. Poor people pay no tax at all. This tax was demanded by many parties, and even the old government introduced it during the war, but it levied little on the rich.

In addition, all indirect taxes such as excise taxes, duties, and similar levies should be abolished.

universal civil equality; inviolability of person and domicile; complete separation of church and state and declaration of religion as a private matter of each individual; establishment of compulsory, equal for all, public secular education at state expense; equality of languages; free legal proceedings; abolition of the standing army and its replacement with a people's militia.

In the national economic sphere.

In matters of labor legislation, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party aims to protect the spiritual and physical strength of the working class and enhance its capacity for further liberation struggles, to which the general interests must take precedence over narrow practical, immediate local, and professional concerns of individual working groups. In these pursuits, the party will advocate for: a potentially greater reduction of working hours within the bounds of surplus labor; the establishment of a legal maximum working time based on norms indicated by scientific hygiene (in the near future, an 8-hour standard for most sectors of production, and proportionally less in more hazardous and detrimental environments); the setting of minimum wages through agreements between self-government bodies and workers' trade unions; state-sponsored insurance in all its forms (against accidents, unemployment, illness, old age, etc.), funded by the state and employers and operating on principles of self-management by the insured; legislative safeguards for labor across all industries and trade, aligning with scientific hygiene standards, overseen by factory inspections elected by workers (ensuring normal working conditions, hygienic premises, prohibiting work for minors under 16, limiting work for minors, banning female and child labor in certain sectors and times, providing adequate uninterrupted weekly rest, etc.); occupational safety and health for workers, etc.); the professional organization of workers and their increasingly active involvement in establishing internal regulations within industrial establishments.

In matters of agrarian policy and land relations, the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries aims to utilize, in the interests of socialism and the struggle against bourgeois property, both the communal and, in general, the labor attitudes, traditions, and forms of life of the Russian peasantry, especially their view of land as the common property of all workers. In these matters, the party will advocate for the socialization of all privately owned lands, i.e., their removal from the private property of individuals and their transfer to public ownership and disposal by democratically organized communities and territorial unions of communities on the basis of equalized use. In case this main basic requirement of the agrarian program-minimum is not implemented immediately, as a revolutionary measure, the P.S.-R. in its further agrarian policy will be guided by considerations of the POSSIBLE approximation to the realization of the minimum agrarian program.
The P.S.-R. in its further agrarian policy will be guided by considerations of the POSSIBLE approximation to the realization of this demand in its entirety, advocating possible transitional measures, such as: the extension of the rights of communities and their territorial unions to expropriate private lands; the confiscation of monastic, appanage, cabinet, and other lands and their conversion, as well as state property, for the same purpose of providing communities with sufficient land, as well as for the needs of resettlement and resettlement; limitation of payment for land use to the size of net farm income (after deducting from gross income the costs of production and normal remuneration for labor); remuneration for improvements made to the land when the use of the land is transferred from one person to another, conversion of rent by means of a special tax to the income of communities and self-government bodies.
In matters of financial policy, the party will advocate for the introduction of a progressive tax on income and inheritance, with complete exemption from tax for small incomes below a certain threshold; for the abolition of indirect taxes (excluding the taxation of luxury goods), protective duties, and generally taxes that burden labor.

In matters of municipal and zemstvo economy, the party will stand for the development of all kinds of public services (free medical care, zemstvo-agronomic organization, communalization of water supply, lighting, ways and means of communication, etc.); for granting urban and rural communities the broadest rights to tax immovable property and to forcibly alienate it, especially in the interests of satisfying the housing needs of the working population; for communal, zemstvo, and state policies that favor the development of cooperation on strictly democratic principles.

When it comes to various measures aimed at nationalizing within the bourgeois state certain sectors of the national economy, the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries can only support them when and to the extent that the democratization of the political system and the balance of social forces, as well as the nature of the measures themselves, provide sufficient guarantees against increasing the dependence of the working class on the ruling bureaucracy through this means. However, the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries warns the working class against the "state socialism" which partly acts as a means to strengthen the working class but also partly operates as a form of state capitalism, concentrating various sectors of production and trade in the hands of the ruling bureaucracy for its fiscal and political purposes.

The Socialist-Revolutionary Party, engaging in direct revolutionary struggle against autocracy, advocates for the convocation of the Zemsky Sobor (Constituent Assembly), freely elected by the entire people without distinction of gender, class, nationality, or religion, to abolish the autocratic regime and restructure all existing orders. It will both present its program of this restructuring in the Constituent Assembly and strive to implement it directly during the revolutionary period.